BVI 2025: Nov 23rd - Nanny Cay Marina , Tortola to Kelly's Cove, Norman Island

 Despite the jet lag, we woke up around 7am and made coffee. I ate a granola breakfast with the lactose free milk powder I'd brought from California, because there was no lactose free milk to be had during the provisioning the night before. Nothing was going to be available until 8am, but we ran around the boat looking for things that needed to be fixed before we left. Massi had discovered that her cabin fan didn't work, but surprisingly, as they had promised to Mark and Kathryn the day before, everything else seemed ready to go. We still had a little bit more provisioning to do (I'd forgotten my sailing gloves), and obviously the scuba gear and paddleboard would also have to be delivered before we left.

At 8:00am, the office opened and we promptly walked in. Ahead of us was a gentlemen who looked flustered and angry. It turned out that he had gotten his boat out late the day before, and then discovered that his generator didn't work, which meant he didn't have AC for the night, so in a fit of fury he returned to Nanny Cay at the fuel dock to get it fixed since he'd lost faith in Navigare, our charter company. 

When we got to our turn, the receptionist had us finish off the paper work, and to our surprise, immediately got onto the phone and called our scuba equipment company asking them to deliver as soon as possible. She took my deposit for the boat, gave us a boat phone, various documents, and then asked us when we would like to depart. "As quickly as possible", came our reply. She looked a little taken aback and then proceeded to organize people to try to get us a check out captain. I was amazed at this level of customer service --- at previous charters most employees operated on "island time", and we'd be lucky to get off the docks by noon, these folks seemed intent on getting us out earlier!

Sure enough, by 8:45am, a checkout captain came by and started showing us the boat systems. These include the sewage pumpouts (which were electronic), where the fuses were, the sails, the engines, and the watermaker operation. The watermaker on this boat was in the strangest place possible inside the port side engine compartment. We were taught how to turn it on and which valve to adjust, but it would turn out later that the story we were told wasn't complete. We asked how often we were supposed to check the engine oil, and were told to check it every other day. Again, that was a unique schedule, as previous charter companies would say "every day", or "not at all, you paid for a boat with working engines!"

We noticed that the dinghy didn't come with a fuel canister, which we needed, and also noted that the water tanks needed to be topped off. In addition, Massi's cabin fan hadn't been fixed yet. The checkout captain seemed very optimistic that everything would be ready in time, but it was already 9:30. Surprisingly enough, things started happening at 10:00am. The scuba equipment arrived, along with the paddleboard, delivered by the same company. At the spur of a moment I decided to ask for two paddleboards, which the company happened to have, so they strapped it on. Arturo had worried that we wouldn't have enough space for two paddleboards but it turned out that they would just strap them back to back, fins out, and it worked out great.

Massi's fan got fixed, a hose was found to fill out water tanks, and then at 10:30am, and the boat next to us got moved so we were clear! The checkout captain came by and asked: "Would you like me to take it out or would you like to take it out yourself." It'd been 2 years since I'd operated a Catamaran, so I decided to let him take it out. The got us out of the dock and past the fuel dock, then a dinghy came to pick him up and I took over the helm.

We motor'd out of the channel markers and immediately prepared to raise the sail. I wanted to hit Norman Island, either Kelly's Cove or Privateer Bay. The sails went up without a hitch and before long I'd turned off the engines and we were sailing across the Sir Francis Drake channel. Privateer Bay looked busy, with multiple boats already alongside for the famous snorkeling near the Caves, so we opted to head to Kelly's Cove where we picked up a mooring ball for the night.

My initial thought was that we'd dinghy out to the Caves for a snorkel right after lunch but Xiaoqin and Arturo persuaded me that the smart thing to do was to snorkel at Kelly's Cave first so everyone got their gear ready. We ate lunch and did that. It turned out that the Yans thought they had snorkeled before, but their experience was a very curated one where they essentially put their face in the water, no swimming involved. So we had to set things up for them. Ying got 2 swimming noodles, and both Mingkuan and his dad got life jackets. After that initial snorkel the kids wanted to paddleboard so we got out the paddleboards. One of them didn't have an ankle tie, so we had to tie a spare piece of line where the ankle tie would be, and use that line to cleat the paddleboard off whenever it wasn't in use. We relied on all paddleboarders being confident swimmers to avoid having the kids tie a line around themselves every time they used it. Since the only kids onboard were mine and mine were good swimmers it worked out.

The kids, as kids would do decided to use the ankle tie on the one to tie to the other kid's paddleboard, and would take turns towing each other or just fool around. After they were done, each of the adults who were interested got a chance to play with them as well. Mingkuan was on his school's rowing team and took to paddleboarding with ease.

We got the dinghy out, put all of us in it, and sluggishly waddled across the mouth of the bight to the dinghy tie off to the caves. The outboard engine wasn't the most powerful, and it got the job done, but with 11 people on the dinghy it would ship water at the slightest provocation. Fortunately, we never took long enough trips on the dinghy for it to be a big deal.

Snorkeling at the caves is always fantastic, and we had fun exploring. The Yans were a bit overwhelmed, it being their second experience, and went back to the dinghy after exploring just two out of the three caves, but we had our fill and returned to the boat.

Arturo planned to have burgers for dinner tonight, and he had a hard time starting the grill. We tried to get the water maker running, but learned that it wasn't as easy. We called tech support but he was of no help. Eventually, the device would randomly work and we'd start getting water coming out of the water maker, after which we would close the engine compartment. Meanwhile, Arturo had finally managed to get the grill started despite the breeze, and proceeded to cook no less than 15 burgers.

Over the next few days, starting the water maker was always wracked with uncertainty. Eventually, Arturo would figure out the procedure, turning the knob all the way nearly closed until the device started pumping water, and then turning it back to increase the pressure until it started producing water. Once the water maker started, it was very fast, easily keeping up with all the showers on the boat running at once. Once the water tank read 100% (another weird quirk of the boat was that the water tank gauge would jump from 89% to 100% with nothing in between), we would turn off the generator.

After dinner, I showed Ying, Stone and MingKuan how washing up on a freshwater limited boat worked --- you would grab a couple of buckets of sea water, and soap up, and then only rinse with fresh water. While we had a water maker, every minute of water making consumed diesel, so we were effectively paying for water.

After all the washing was done, we turned off the lights for evening star gazing. We didn't know it then, but this would be the best night of star gazing for the trip, as the moon was waxing, and the weather wouldn't stay cooperative for the rest of the trip. The air was warm and stargazing on a sailboat on a Caribbean is a very comfortable way to do it. I spotted a shooting star, and it on a look up on the internet confirmed that this must be amongst the last remnants of the leonids meteor shower.

I proposed a plan to Arturo for the next day: a dive at the Indians in the morning, then a visit to the new wreck of the Willy T's near Key Cay on Peter Island, and then to Cooper Island for the night for a refill. It was an aggressive schedule but in the past I'd always been able to get to Cooper Island for a mooring ball by 2:00pm.

Review: Grunt

 In truth, this review of Grunt should be marked a re-read, since I'd read it before but had forgotten to write a review. In this book, Mary Roach in her inimitable style explores the various scientists/engineers who work for the military and design the equipment.and procedures that are used by the men (and women) in uniform.

Mary Roach shies away from the sexy and fun stuff like weapons and armor, but goes for the weird stuff like penile reconstruction surgery for victims of IEDs. This made me a bit queasy to read about so you need to have a strong stomach.

There's also stuff like noise reduction and hearing loss (which makes sense), submarine rescue (which is pretty astonishing, but apparently those rescues using a diving bell like apparatus did happen successfully!).

The book is enjoyable to read and like all of Mary Roach's books worth your time without a lot of fluff. Recommended.

2025 BVI Sailing Trip

 This is the index page for the 2025 BVI Sailing trip that I organized. Joining my family this time was Arturo and Massi Crespo, Mark and Kathryn Brody, Ying, her husband Stone, and their son Mingkuan. The trip happened over Thanksgiving break, and included 4 dives, lots of snorkeling, and many of the highlights that we had done on previous trips. Set against that were changes in the BVIs that were for the worse --- a new mooring ball reservation system that was a money grab and made mooring at Cooper Island and Marina Cay very iffy propositions, and over-crowding that made the mooring balls at the Baths a highly contentious affair.

This was Boen's first trip to the BVIs since he learned how to swim. This is the index page for the day by day trip report, videos, and picture links.

• Shared Photo Album
• Bubbly Pool at Jost Van Dyke
• Wreck of the Rhone
• Diamond Reef

Trip Log

• Nov 21-22: Prologue
• Nov 23: Nanny Cay Marina, Tortola to Kelly's Cove, Norman Island
• Nov 24: Kelly's Cove, Norman Island to Deadman's Bay, Peter Island
• Nov 25: Deadman's Bay, Peter Island to Marina Cay
• Nov 26: Marina Cay to Long Bay, Jost Van Dyke
• Nov 27: Long Bay, Jost Van Dyke to White Bay, Peter Island
• Nov 28: White Bay, Peter Island to Privateer Bay, Norman Island
• Nov 29: Privateer Bay, Norman Island
• Nov 30: Privateer Bay, Norman Island to Nanny Cay Marina, Tortola
•  Epilogue

Building Xiaoiqin's Ritchey Montebello

 Last year, we purchased a Lynskey GR300 for Xiaoqin. But she never really liked the bike that much though she appreciated the SRAM Force electronic shifting, which was quiet, fast, and consistent. There were probably many reasons for this -- the frame was probably too overbuilt and stiff for someone in her weight class. The bike was about 4 pounds heavier than her Ritchey Road Logic (which at this point has nearly 8000 miles on it!), the fitting never quite got there. Furthermore, the SRAM Force gearing bottomed out at 30/36, which is still a higher gear than what her Road Logic had --- that along with the bigger tires meant that the highest gear was much too high and the lowest gear wasn't as low as what was on her Ritchey logic. I've long been convinced that manufacturers design road bike gearing for fit 25 year olds with good knees and SRAM while much better than Shimano in this regards is still inadequate.

So we sold it. We had several ideas for a replacement, since having wider tires would enable her to do rides that her Road Logic (with its 32mm max tire clearance) don't quite have sufficient clearance for. These were the Fairlight Strael, the Ritchey Montebello, or the David Kirk Onesto. The Montebello won because it was most available (the other frames had at least a 6 month wait). The Trump tariffs also made the Fairlight much more expensive than it otherwise would have been.

Taking advantage of some black friday sales, I bought a bunch of parts and had Velotech in Palo Alto put the bike together:

• Ritchey Comp Zeta Disc Wheels
• Shimano Duraace BB paired with 160mm Shimano 105 Cranks
• Wolftooth 38t narrow wide chainring
• SRAM Force Mullet Groupset (Force brake levers and brakes, X01 Eagle Rear Derailleur, XX1 Rainbow Cassette 10-52, SRAM Eagle XX1 chain)
• Thompson Elite Seat post
• Ritchey WCS Skyline handlebars
• Ritchey RL-1 84 Stem
• Specialized Power Arc Pro Elaston saddle
• SRAM Force 140mm brake rotors
• Rene Herse Barlow Pass tires 700x38

I used the Stem Reach Calculator to compute the correct stem length to bring the reach and stack as close to her Ritchey Road Logic as possible, but didn't realize that Wade had shortened her stem on the Ritchey logic on a previous visit. It turned out that the Montebello's stack height was tall enough, however, that she wanted the extra reach, and we ended up not having to leave as much of the stem stick out as we thought we would need.

I tried to stick to as many Ritchey parts as possible on this build, save for the stuff that I knew worked well or were similar to her Road Logic. In particular, I had noted that the Lynskey's SRAM Force BB and Crankset were painful to extract compared to the Shimano cranksets I was used to, so stuck with the Shimano. The 12 speed gearing also allowed me to use a slightly smaller chainring (38t) to grant both a lower low gear and a higher high gear than her Ritchey Road Logic. I also decided to go for 140mm brake rotors for more weight reduction, saving weight not only by using smaller rotors, but also by eliminating the need for the adapter required to match the rear brake with 160mm rotors.

I considered the Shimano Di2 wireless system --- now that they have a wireless rear derailleur that can handle a 10-51 cassette they were actually worth considering. But I ruled Shimano out because the microspline standard makes it hard to get standard road wheels (once again, Shimano makes life hard for people who like low gears on road bikes), and the Ultegra level road brifters on Shimano components comes not with carbon fiber blades but with metal blades. Over the years, I've discovered that carbon brake levers act as insulators instead of conductors and are key to being able to use short finger gloves (or no gloves) while riding in cooler conditions. I do not believe I can recommend modern Shimano components to anyone who's not racing. I've been watching fellow tourists all switch one by one to SRAM setups, and I think Shimano has seriously screwed themselves by deliberately segregating their road and MTB gearing systems.

The net result was that the Ritchey Montebello came in only 1kg heavier than her Road Logic, no mean feat given that disc brakes, wireless electronic shifting, and hydraulics all contribute significant weight to a bike, not to mention the heavier frame, which came in at a hair over 2kg, which was disappointing as her Road Logic came in at 1600g, which was 150g lighter than specified.

What impressed me the most about Velotech was the master mechanic, Tom (who's the only mechanic in the shop) assembled the first bike with disc brakes I've seen that doesn't squeal, no matter how sharply I braked on my test ride.

Xiaoqin reports that the bike felt very smooth and comfortable, but the true test of any bike is whether you ride it a lot, so we'll have to see what the long term outlook likes like.

BVI 2025: Nov 22 Prologue

 We boarded the red eye on November 21st, switching planes in Chicago at 6:00am and making it to STT airport at 2:00pm, too late to make the 2:30pm ferry, but within striking distance of the 4:30pm ferry. Once of the plane we walked rapidly through the airport since we didn't need luggage, and got a taxi that delivered us to the ferry terminal within half an hour.

At the ferry terminal, we discovered that ferry ticket prices had gone up dramatically since our last visit to the BVIs --- for a family of 4 it now cost over $300, and bag fees were mandatory. There was also a new electronic entry system for the BVI, so rather than filling out a paper form I had to use my phone. We met with our neighbors who were coming along on the trip, Ying, Stone, and their son Mingkuan. Arturo, Mark, Kathryn, and Massi had made it onto the 2:00pm ferry, so they would get to the boat first and start provisioning.

On the ferry, we received word that we needed to be first in line to get off the ferry, as the electronic system had made things slower instead of faster. Our boat, the La Badine (a 45' Lagoon Catamaran) was not ready yet, so Mark and Kathryn had to watch the luggage while Arturo went to provision the boat. The ferry ride was slow, but uneventful other than the constant exhortations to sit down instead o moving around and taking pictures, a far cry from past visits where we could do whatever we liked. Arriving at Road town at 5:15pm, we were not let off until at least 5:30pm, and despite being 4th in line to get to the customs and passport controls, it took 30 minutes to exit!

We got to the boat just in time for them to let Mark and Kathryn in, and we moved into the boat, learned where the showers were, and then Arturo and Massi showed up with the provisions! That took us a good 30 minutes to organize, but then after that we went to the Peg Legs restaurant for a group dinner. As is usual in the BVIs it takes a super long time for the food to be served but eventually it was served, we had dinner, did our shower things, and went to bed. We were told that the boat next to ours, the Lili was being worked on (Mark would later tell us that they'd taken the steering rod out and straightened it out by having multiple men stand on it!) and we'd be awakened early anyway even if we slept badly.

Arturo discovered that the generator was running despite us being at dock. Since it made it impossible for those in the V-berths to sleep, we turned it off. We wondered why the generators were on even though the shore power cable was plugged in, and concluded that the power delivery at the docks must have been so weak that running the ACs (which was necessary during the day for the comfort of the cleaning and repair crew) would blow the fuses dockside. This is the kind of thing you encounter frequently if you charter in the Caribbean but would mystify a first time charter client.

2026 Book Reviews

 Non-Fiction

• Science Under Seige
• Cosmos
• Grunt

Fiction

• Zen and the art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Graphic Novels

• Batman by Grant Morrison

Re-read: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Mainteneance

 One of the perils of reading books to your kids in an effort to mold their tastes is that while they might not take to the reading, you're going to get sucked in and re-read the book. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was something I started reading to Boen in an effort to get him to stop reading easier books. I got him a couple of chapters into it and to my surprise it was surprisingly easy reading --- the thing about having done many bicycle tours by this point in his life, the touring aspects of the book were completely comprehensible and enjoyable for Boen.

I enjoyed the book on this reading, even getting into the section on the various philosophers that I'd always tried to zip through as fast as I could. What's interesting for me on this reading was the considerable emphasis on academic life. At no point do we get any motivation from Pirsig's narrator as to why he spent all that time teaching. It's quite clear that after his nervous breakdown he was capable of holding on to other jobs like technical writing.

Another aspect of the book that comes to mind was how uninterested Pirsig's narrator was in systemic answers. At the time of publication the United States was comparatively wealthy compared to the rest of the world, and hence the narrator had the luxury of assuming that physical well being could be taken for granted. In the current political environment that's not quite possible, and the book provides no solutions and even seems to try to move away from seeking such solutions.

To the extent that craftsmanship has become devalued in modern society in favor of an ever bigger emphasis on the use of AI to achieve goals with minimum effort, it's quite clear that the book failed to influence society in a better direction. I suppose it's too much to expect a book, any book to influence society to any such extent. One can only fantasize about a society that takes the tenets described by the book to a greater extent.

Review: Cosmos

 Boen was resisting learning math, so I bought him Cosmos, A Spacetime Odyssey and we started watching it together. Bowen got really into it, and I bought him Cosmos: Possible Worlds as well, and all that reminded me that I owned the original Carl Sagan book and then I read that as well.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that my interest in science and decision to become a scientist was driven by the original TV series. I will say that there's an elegance and sense of wonder conveyed by the Cosmos TV shows that I do not find in other documentaries. Xiaoqin's been watching various PBS series, and nobody comes close to Carl Sagan or Neil Degrasse Tyson as hosts. Their enthusiasm for science comes right through.

Not only is Cosmos a science documentary, it's also a history of science documentary. I love the episode about Clair Paterson fighting the oil/gas industry to make leaded gasoline a thing of the past. The obvious parallels to the failed climate change accords is stark. It's also how prescient Carl Sagan was about the need to popularize science in this parable about the library of Alexandria:

The permanence of the stars was questioned; the justice of slavery was not. Science and learning in general were the preserve of a privileged few. The vast population of the city had not the vaguest notion of the great discoveries taking place within the Library. New findings were not explained or popularized. The research benefited them little. Discoveries in mechanics and steam technology were applied mainly to the perfection of weapons, the encouragement of superstition, the amusement of kings. The scientists never grasped the potential of machines to free people.* The great intellectual achievements of antiquity had few immediate practical applications. Science never captured the imagination of the multitude. There was no counterbalance to stagnation, to pessimism, to the most abject surrenders to mysticism. When, at long last, the mob came to burn the Library down, there was nobody to stop them. (kindle loc 5565)

 Obviously, I'm very happy to see my kids being exposed to the influences I was when growing up. I'm really sad that the US is trending to become an anti-science society as warned by Carl Sagan. But as long as we can find scientists who're willing to stand up and explain to the general population why this stuff is relevant I can hold out hope that as the consequences of ignoring science become more and more obvious we can have a return to sanity. One thing that the scientific community has completely fallen down on is its failure to reward and award prestige to the people doing the important work.

For the newer TV shows, I found Possible Worlds to be less interesting --- it has quite a bit more speculative stuff, and I didn't feel like it was as strong about science history. Nevertheless both kids watched both shows and it was a good use of my Google video credits. Recommended!

Review: Science Under Seige

 Science Under Siege is the account of the authors' experience working as researchers in both climate science and vaccines, both of whom have suffered death threats (both authors have needed police protection at their houses), widespread industry attempts to discredit them and attempts to intimidate them (not to mention online smear campaigns and publicity aimed at causing them to lose their jobs).

As you can imagine, this is a depressing book to read, and it took me many days and multiple pauses because it was distressing. The book points out that there are several actors that have to get rid of the professional science/educated class in order to achieve their goals (which are largely to retain their wealth):

• plutocrats (rich people)
• petro-states (Russia, the Arabic states, and obviously oil producing states such as Texas, Alberta)
• propagandists (who make their money off being paid by the above as well as by hawking alternative medicines)

It's very interesting to me that after hearing Carl Sagan and Neil Degrasse Tyson continually dispasraged by science snobs, these are the first two bona-fide scientists who referred to Carl Sagan as "great." I agree with them. In a world where the public has little to no science education in school (even in Singapore, the science education was abysmal), TV shows like Cosmos was what got me into science and enthusiastic about science. Science communications and education is essential or the electorate will lose their support for science, given how much more powerful these other agents of society are.

The details in the book are pretty telling, where the one of the authors were accused of making money off selling vaccines even though their vaccines were given away for free for no commercial return. And obviously climate denial has been a thing for ages. The authors do point out that despair is not an appropriate reaction --- that's what the opponents want you to do --- is to give up and do nothing. They also point out that mainstream newspapers like the New York Times have in recent years gone from caring more about accuracy and correctness to only caring about "balance." As a result, the lab leak theory (which apparently does not have much support from real scientists) for COVID19 was given more credence than it should have been.

The end of the book has the authors showing off their geek creds by analogizing their battle against misinformation and anti-science with the plot of The Lord of the Rings --- except in this case they're not expecting the white wizard to come in and save them.

On reflection, ultimately the reason science will eventually win is that nature doesn't care whether you believe in scientific theories. The consequences of ignoring climate science is already being felt today, and the consequences of not getting vaccinated are going to be pretty severe as well. The American public that has bought into anti-vaccine and anti-climate propaganda are going to be in for a very painful few decades.

You should read this book. It's not going to be fun reading but it's essential.

Review: Batman by Grant Morrison

 Grant Morrison won Eisner Awards, so I had high expectations of his Batman book. I came away quite disappointed --- clearly, I've aged out of the audience for this. The first thing is that the collection is badly organized, so you're getting fragments of the story out of order or with connecting stories taken out. That made it quite challenging to stay engaged and interested throughout the reading.

The second issue is that you've got someone introduced as Bruce Wayne's son. By the middle of the book you realize there's no way Bruce Wayne is a secret identity --- everyone seems to know that he's Batman! At no point do we ever get the feeling that Batman is competent. He seems to be bewildered, reacting to events rather than anticipating them.

Then there's the mystical stuff involving Ra's al Ghul and his daughter, and that storyline was never very attractive to me. I checked this book out of the library and am glad I didn't pay money for this.

Books of the Year 2025

 I read 72 books this year, which is more than my usual count, probably because I started reading more graphic novels again, which tend to read fast. The best book I read this year was probably Twitter and Tear Gas. If you want to understand why the civil rights movement and the labor movement won, while "occupy wall street" and the "arab spring" failed, this is the book to read. Zeynep Tufekci's writing is worth reading wherever you can find it. It's rare to find a book where I regretted checking it out from the library instead of buying it, and this book is exceptional. Other exceptional non-fiction were Abundance and The Woman Behind the New Deal. I will admit that I treated those two books as escapist fiction into a world where the American people actually elected leaders who could do good things.

The best fiction I read this year was Exhalation, but of course that was a re-read, so it shouldn't count. The best novel that was new to me was probably Norwegian Wood. It got me to read more Haruki Murakami, though that binge didn't last. A runner up would be A Widow for One Year.

The best graphic novel I read was Flashpoint. It's an excellent story and very much worth your time, even if you're not normally into superheroes.

I only got through one Audio Book this year, The Power Broker. It's well worth your time and you should read it in conjunction with Abundance to see how the American system went from being capable of doing amazing feats of construction in New York City to being barely able to build a toilet for $1 million in San Francisco. It's not for bad reasons, but you still wish that the pendulum hadn't quite swung all the way.

Here's to another year of great reading!

Review: Very Far Away From Anywhere Else

 I remember reading Very Far Away From Anywhere Else as a teenager and finding it very moving. It was sort of a teen romance story, but without any external drama, or even an unrealistic ending. I worried as I re-read it as an adult that it would be one of those stories that didn't age well, but I shouldn't have worried --- this is Ursula Le Guin, and the story is timeless.

Owen is a nerdy, introverted kid with aspirations for MIT and big ideas. He doesn't have any friends and is alienated from his own parents since they don't understand him but have expectations for him that he doesn't want to live up to.  He meets Natalie (or rather, finally notices her, since they're in the same classes) one day on the bus and they finally start to talk and get to know each other.

Their relationship develops but encounters the uncertainty and mixed-upness that teenagers would have, except in this case Natalie is much more mature than Owen, and knows what she wants out of life and Owen doesn't.

I won't spoil the ending for you --- it's a bittersweet ending and not the usual saccharine endings that most Americans would expect. The book's a short read, and well, if you're anything like the kid I was when I was 16, it will haunt you for years.

Review: Plays Well With Others

 Plays Well With Others claims to dispell myths about human relations with science.  It turned out to be a fun book to read and well-written. Fundamentally it, it covers certain aphorisms you might have heard of, such as "A friend in need is a friend indeed", "No man is an island", and "Love conquers all." The author, Eric Barker, then does a deep dive into the meaning of the aphorism, and the scientific evidence for and against.

Richard Wiseman of the University of Hertfordshire says you tell about two whoppers a day. Whom do you lie to most frequently? Mom. (kindle loc 605)

I enjoyed the discussion on how bad humans are at lie detection. And why is that? It turns out that trusting people is much less stressful.  

One study asked people how much they trust others on a scale of one to ten. Income was highest among those who responded with the number eight. And low-trust people fared far worse than overtrusters. Their losses were the equivalent of not going to college. They missed many opportunities by not trusting. In The Confidence Game Maria Konnikova points to an Oxford study showing that “people with higher levels of trust were 7 percent more likely to be in better health,” and 6 percent more likely to be “very” happy rather than “pretty” happy or “not happy at all.”  (kindle loc 738)

 The section on love is also surprisingly upbeat. It does provide the context that in the past most marriages were not based on love, and the modern divorce rates are incredibly high. But it also notes that when modern marriages work they work far better than historical marriages did with huge benefits to both parties.

Other interesting titbits from the book include the fact that Prozac is largely a placebo:

 A 2014 paper concluded: “Analyses of the published data and the unpublished data that were hidden by drug companies reveals that most (if not all) of the benefits are due to the placebo effect.” And another study, titled “Listening to Prozac but Hearing Placebo,” looked at over 2,300 subjects and found “approximately one quarter of the drug response is due to the administration of an active medication, one half is a placebo effect, and the remaining quarter is due to other nonspecific factors.” Did these papers result in a torrent of pushback from the scientific community at large? Nope. (kindle loc 2791)

In fact, the placebo effect is so strong because we're so wired to be social that the fact that someone is paying attention is enough to make most problems go away, since the fact that you're socially supported in itself is enough for your brain to think that you're fine. In fact, the most optimistic scenario tends to happen in a crisis, when despite popular conception, people ignore class and party lines and just give help to everyone in an egalitarian fashion:

When we are one, we don’t need placebos. We give care and are provided with care. During war, psychiatric admissions decline. This phenomenon has been documented time and time again. When Belfast experienced riots in the 1960s, depression plummeted in the districts with the most violence and went up where there was none. Psychologist H. A. Lyons wrote, “It would be irresponsible to suggest violence as a means of improving mental health, but the Belfast findings suggest that people will feel better psychologically if they have more involvement with their community.” (kindle loc 2851)

I found the book rich with insights and very easy to read. Recommended.

 

Review: Aurora

 Aurora is Kim Stanley Robinson's book about a generation starship arriving at Tau Ceti after several generations. The colonists onboard the ship have at this point been several generations apart from the folks who volunteered to go on this mission, and the ship itself is falling apart. We learn that the planet they're supposed to colonize ("Aurora") is actually a moon of another world orbiting Tau Ceti, and upon landing on the planet, they discover that the planet is not actually lifeless as they thought but has a mysterious micro-organism that starts killing the colonists.

A conventional science fiction story would have the colonists trying to find a cure to this micro-organism (which isn't a virus or a bacterium --- we never know what it is), but Robinson didn't not write a conventional science fiction novel. Instead, there's next to no biologists with technical expertise to come up with any kind of cure, and the moon was kinda sucky anyway as a place to live --- very strong winds, and no actual way for the colonists to self-sustain without serious terraforming work.

So the colonists take a vote on what to do next, igniting a civil war when two factions cannot agree on what to do. In the end, the somewhat sentient starship takes a role, and the groups compromise on setting up the "stayers" for success on a different moon within the system, and the "backers" get to take a reduced version of the starship back to Earth. The "stayers" obviously do not have a good outcome, and the story then follows the "backers" on their exciting journey back to Earth on a rapidly deteriorating craft ending up with an exciting rescue and a denouement of the idea of colonizing planets in other systems.

I enjoyed how well thought out the generation starship approach was, as well as the ideas about what tends to go wrong with such systems and how 2000+ people (about the population of the Starship Enterprise) wouldn't be sufficient to last over 200 years on a journey. I'm not sure I liked the section about the sentient starship which wasn't actually sentient at the start of the journey, and I disliked how few technical people there were for a project of this magnitude. You could argue that expertise was lost over generations, but it seemed that cross generation education wouldn't be something you would want to leave to chance.

The book also assumes that people will continue to want to have more children than they're allocated, but the last 20 years might teach you that the kind of highly educated people who would want to go on missions like this would probably have the opposite problem!

All in all, I enjoyed the critique of "man's mission is to expand to the stars", and the realistic view that when you sign up for one of these generational missions, you're signing up your children and they might not want to do what you signed them up to do. The characters are as wooden as any you'll find in science fiction, but not so badly written that I stopped reading.

Review: Struck by Genius

 Struck by Genius is the story of Jason Padgett (ghost written by Maureen Seaberg) about his transition from being a non-academic party animal to becoming a Savant after a mugging that caused a traumatic brain injury.

It is very rare that brain injury can have benefits rather than being purely detrimental, but Padgett was one of the lucky ones. He described his life prior to the mugging, with very little discipline two marriages and a kid out of wedlock, with a focus on partying and disliking academics. He describes this memory like remembering another person.

After the mugging, he started seeing patterns and shapes whenever he saw numbers, and the PTSD caused him to hole up in his apartment for 4 years, seeing no one except his daughter whenever he visited. His fascination with Math and patterns developed and after he had enough self-learning he went back to working at his father's furniture shop and enrolled in community college to learn formal math.

In between, he was compelled to draw. The pieces of art he draws range from simple geometric shapes to his interpretation of a hydrogen atom or quantum events. He says he read Born On a Blue Day and identified himself someone who saw numbers in shapes or colors, and then started going to conferences for people with that syndrome, where he met doctors who tested him and attested that he had all the attributes of a savant born with that syndrome but with fewer drawbacks.

There are all sorts of theories in the book that don't pass muster with me --- for instance, there's a doctor that claims that his mathematical abilities are a result of genetic memory. That makes zero sense and I see no way mathematical concepts could be encoded into genes, other than that the structure of the brain itself is determined (obviously) by genetics. That's also compounded by the fact that as far as I can tell, Padgett hasn't contributed to academic mathematics.

The book is easy reading and quite a bit of fun. I'm not sure I'd agree with many of the conclusions he or his doctors draw from his syndrome, but it's still a remarkable event and story.

Review: Ghost in the Shell - Standalone Complex

 Ghost in the Shell - Standalone Complex was on sale for $2, so I picked up the kindle copy. In case you haven't kept up with any of the Ghost in the Shell movies, the world is a cyberpunk universe in which major Motoko Kusanagi runs a top-shelf police/commando unit that deals with criminals, terrorists, and political operators in world where human brains can be moved into cyborg bodies and brain swapping is something that's feasible.

This particular story isn't written/drawn by the original creator of the universe, but in some ways that's a good thing --- there aren't any assumptions that you know what the conventions of the cyberpunk genre is, and so concepts are introduced in such a way that a reader is not lost. The characters are a bit wooden, and the art occasionally hard to follow.

The mystery in this episode is easy to follow, and most important for someone like me, fair. You're given all the clues in the story (along with the world-building needed to make use of the clues), and when the reveal happens you're not left feeling like the writer cheated you by pulling out some previously unknown facts.

The action in the story is just OK. I suspect that at the time the comic was written it probably would have been perceived as much more innovative than it is today, but obviously the bar for special effects has been raised quite a bit.

I enjoyed the book, despite having been away from cyberpunk for a while. It's enjoyable and easy to follow.

Review: The Grand Design

 The Grand Design came recommended by the Amazon Kindle direct mail ad, and it was available at the library so I checked it out and read it. It's an easy to read Physics primer that discusses the difficulty reconciling quantum mechanics and general relativity, and discusses what the evidence for the accuracy of these theories are.

What I enjoyed was how clearly written the descriptions of the weak Anthropic principle and the stronger versions of the Anthropic principles are. In particular, the authors go over how finely tuned the fundamental constants of nature are, and even go so far as to explain why the Universe had to have 3 dimensions instead of 4 or 6 or 10:

If one assumes that a few hundred million years in stable orbit are necessary for planetary life to evolve, the number of space dimensions is also fixed by our existence. That is because, according to the laws of gravity, it is only in three dimensions that stable elliptical orbits are possible. Circular orbits are possible in other dimensions, but those, as Newton feared, are unstable. In any but three dimensions even a small disturbance, such as that produced by the pull of the other planets, would send a planet off its circular orbit and cause it to spiral either into or away from the sun, so we would either burn up or freeze. Also, in more than three dimensions the gravitational force between two bodies would decrease more rapidly than it does in three dimensions. In three dimensions the gravitational force drops to ¼ of its value if one doubles the distance. In four dimensions it would drop to ⅛, in five dimensions it would drop to 1/16 and so on. As a result, in more than three dimensions the sun would not be able to exist in a stable state with its internal pressure balancing the pull of gravity. (kindle loc 1530)

Where the book fails is that it promotes M-theory as the one theory that would unify quantum theory with relativity, but doesn't go into why it's superior to all the other theories. One issue is that it's not a single theory, but a class of overlapping theories that can effectively have constants plugged in to satisfy the constraints of the universe we find ourselves in. The authors pretty much state that scientists have to give up on the idea of our laws of physics all deriving from one fundamental theory that fixes all the constants. That's quite disappointing for those who value elegance in their theories, but of couse, nothing says that our messy universe has to correspond to a model of a simple and elegant fundamental theory.

Review: The Woman Behind the New Deal

 The Woman Behind the New Deal is the biography of Frances Perkins, FDR's Secretary of Labor. I've read biographies of FDR before, and they usually gloss over Frances Perkins, but over time as I've read other historical reports (such as Robert A Caro's biography of Lyndon B Johnson and Robert Moses), I saw references to her over and over again.

It turns out that I'd been missing an important part of the origin of the New Deal, the first woman to serve in the President's Cabinet, and the person to whom he delegated all of the various aspects of the New Deal to. A key scene in the story is where Perkins named all the important aspects of what she wanted to accomplish before she would accept the position to FDR. In fact, she noted that Roosevelt was not a deligent person nor was he attentive to detail, but was indeed a C student:

She disapproved of the tendency at Telluride to select for admission only the boys with the highest academic grades, noting that it is often the C student with strong leadership skills and a good personality who makes a greater mark on the world. “Franklin Roosevelt would never be admitted to a first-class college today,” she said. (kindle loc 6978)

Perkins was extremely religious and also quite unlucky with her personal life, marrying a husband who was promising but who turned out to have a family history of mental illness, and after an initial setback in his career never came out of his depression and ended up in one institution after another, leaving her to be a single mom to take care of their only daughter. In that time, mental illness was considered shameful, but society also disapproved of working mothers, so she had to hide a lot of what she was doing. In the ultimate repudiation of her, her own daughter never gave her the respect she deserved, despite Perkins sacrificing so much of her own well being (Perkins herself worked until the day she died, and her family was not present when she passed away):

None of the children were ever told about Frances’s benevolence while Susanna was alive. In fact, they recalled, Susanna generally ridiculed her mother, as she did many people who worked for a living. Frances had spent her life laboring on behalf of America’s workers and had produced a child of the leisure class, more ornamental than useful, who felt contempt for people who worked for a living. (kindle loc 7106)

 Nevertheless, Perkins achieved a great deal. She introduced worker's comp, the 40 hour work week with mandatory overtime, unemployment insurance, and social security. Her next target would have been universal healthcare, but the war got in the way. What a different America we would have lived in if her agenda had been completely achieved. She turned the labor department's statistics department into what it was before Trump decided to start firing bearers of bad news:

Lubin turned the bureau into a respected source of economic statistics. He quickly improved the country’s system for gathering employment and wage statistics, and put systems in place to minimize political pressure to show positive results. For the first time, the federal government tracked hourly earnings and average weekly hours by industry. Lubin also modernized the cost-of-living index. One component in the outdated index was the price of high-button shoes, still included long after people had stopped wearing them. The BLS also tracked productivity, an important gauge of business modernization trends, and it made separate forecasts of growth in different occupations in order to steer workers to new industries. (kindle loc 2627)

Not only was she progressive about worker's rights, she was the first to recognize the threat of Hitler, and did everything in her power to help German jews escape the regieme.  This was despite the prevailing sentiment against immigration:

Frances knew restrictive policies were politically popular. “It is generally recognized that the United States can no longer absorb annually hundreds of thousands of immigrants without serious economic and social dislocations,” she wrote. “Certainly the present restrictions can not be relaxed while millions of workers are unemployed and maintained at public expense.”12 In fact, Frances had to spend much time reassuring disbelieving citizens that immigration had indeed been curtailed. Many refused to believe government statistics, and they circulated reports alleging that 1 million foreign sailors jumped ship in the United States each year, or that five hundred thousand Mexicans strolled across the border in the previous decade. In her annual report in 1935, Frances blasted these accounts as “fantastic exaggerations.” (kindle loc 3488)

Reading this book, you really see the parallels between the current political climate and the what happened in the 1930s and 40s. There was never a time when America's population was positive disposed towards more immigration, and even back then misinformation was still very much prevelant. I'm continually surprised when progressives refuse to admit that immigration is very much in tension with progressive objectives despite that long history. (Think about it: the rest of the world is generally much more conservative than American progressives --- importing a lot of immigrants will not result in a population that's willing to support progressive objectives!)

In any case, this was a book very much worth reading. If you're a feminist, progressive, or student of history you owe it to yourself to read this.

Review: Broken Stars

 Broken Stars is a collection of contemporary science fiction stories, selected and edited by Ken Liu, who's translated many science fiction authors including "The Three Body Problem." I picked it up because it's far faster for me to read English than for me to read Chinese, and obviously I'm not very in touch with Chinese science fiction (or any other contemporary Chinese fiction for that matter)

A lot of the stories in this volume aren't basically science fiction. They're effectively fantasy exercises (including one where a time traveler travels back in time and reinvents the internet), without the rigor of science fiction that I normally expect from my preferred science fiction authors like Alastair Reynolds. Even someone like Iain M Banks (whose Culture novels are set at such a high tech level as to seem magical) do pay attention to the plausibility of many details.

What you do get out of many of these stories is an appreciation of Chinese history. Lots of events in contemporary and past Chinese history is placed in context and you can see how the authors felt about those events. There's just not any "hard" science fiction or even cyberpunk in this collection.

On reflection maybe I shouldn't be surprised. China's demand for tech talent and work environment that probably a heavy STEM engineer or scientist wouldn't have time to write, so the folks writing science fiction in China come from the literary sector and won't be deeply immersed in the science.

At the back of the book is a couple of essays about the state of science fiction in China. This would be informative, but obviously the book was edited prior to the major scandal about WorldCon in China in 2024, where the voting was rigged. It seems like science fiction in China cannot be separated from the governing environment the country is in.

Review: Genius Makers

 Genius Makers is a biography/chronicle of Geoff Hinton and a number of his students, starting from Hinton's entry into the AI field until the night him and two other students won the Turing award.

The book is well written but spotty, with too many characters towards the end of the book showing up and being given barely enough time for you to fully comprehend what's happening. I thoroughly enjoyed to story about how Geoff Hinton, driven by his wife's dislike of living in the USA when Ronald Reagan was president, ended up at the University of Toronto:

At the height of the revival in neural network research, Hinton left Carnegie Mellon for a professorship at the University of Toronto. A few years after this move, as he struggled to find new funding for his research, he wondered if he had made the right decision. “I should have gone to Berkeley,” he told his wife. “Berkeley?” his wife said. “I would have gone to Berkeley.” “But you said you wouldn’t live in the U.S.” “That’s not the U.S. It’s California.” (kindle loc 751)

I left Google at 2010, which was when Google started gobbling up AI talent (including Hinton and his students) at a rapid pace and integrating it into many areas of the company. Google at that time also left China because the Chinese government hacked Google (true story --- I know the people behind the detection). Despite that, Google still thought it could come back into China after Deep Mind became the #1 go player in the world, with Eric Schmidt giving a patronizing talk about Chinese AI:

 China’s tech giants had already embraced deep learning. Andrew Ng had been building labs at Baidu for years, and, like Google, he was erecting a vast network of specialized machines to feed new experiments. Similar work was brewing at Tencent. In any case, even if it did need Google’s help, China was unwilling to take it. The government, after all, had blacked out the match in Wuzhen. It did not take long for Schmidt to realize just how naïve his message had been. “I knew when I gave the speech that the Chinese were coming. I did not understand at the time how totally effective some of their programs would be,” he says. “I honestly just didn’t understand. I think most Americans wouldn’t understand. I’m not going to misunderstand in the future.” (kindle loc 3109)

What was real obvious to outside observers (i.e., anyone with an ounce of common sense) was that the Chinese government would never let a Western company have any significant market share in the country. That Western companies one after another fell into the trap and did a ton of technology transfers to China for free at their own expense just tells you how short-sighted and badly run most Western companies are.

Another thing that comes through in this book was how one top executive (Andrew Ng, Qin Lu) after another with ties to China actually moved back to China or took top jobs at Chinese companies and helped with that technology transfer. Of course, much of this happened before the current cold war between the USA and China, but it's still pretty amazing to watch.

A lot of people I knew from my Google (or even pre-Google) days show up in this book (e.g., Jeff Dean). The depictions are sort of accurate so I do find most of the book believable. The book was written in 2021, so pre-dated the era when ChatGPT took the world by storm. Nevertheless, for an understanding of the history of neural networks and deep learning, this is a book well worth your time.